Oracle Enhances Exalytics, Exalogic Management

Release 3 of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12C is available with enhancements in how it can manage Oracle applications, middleware and engineered systems, including Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Exalogic Elastic Cloud.

Enterprise Manager is Oracle's answer to the need for systems management specific to Oracle products. Enterprise Manager can discover and monitor running databases, applications and middleware, and report on the resources they're using and whether they're approaching preset warning thresholds for performance.

Enterprise Manager reports to a central management console how much CPU, memory and disk I/O an application is using and helps spot performance bottlenecks. It can help provide configuration management and advise a systems administrator if needed patches on the operating system or other parts of the software stack still need to be applied.

In upgrading Enterprise Manager in Release 3, Oracle has included integrated hardware-software management for its engineered appliances. The management package seeks to optimize the performance and availability of the Exalytics or Exalogic appliances, based on Oracle's knowledge of best practices.

The Exalytics approach now supports both physical and virtual deployments, guided discovery of system resources, and a management dashboard that may be personalized. It also supports virtual CPU usage reporting and mapping of the appliance's routing topology.

Exalogic management includes a consolidation planner that allows a user to vet plans to consolidate Java workloads on Exalogic using automated workflows, according to Oracle's announcement on July 2.

Oracle also has pre-created plans for managing Exadata Database Machines, including the ability to scale from a single appliance to racks of multiple machines.

Its management console now allows a view and management of the WebLogic application server, the Glassfish application server and the Tuxedo application server from a single pane of glass.

Release 3's enhancements for Oracle CRM management provides more diagnostics on the accompanying database system in Siebel environments, which makes it simpler to make decisions on those environments.

The Application Replay function in Enterprise Manager, which allows a systems administrator to rerun a stretch of application code to troubleshoot what went wrong in its execution, can now do performance analysis of user sessions, Oracle said in its announcement. The capability allows faster responses to user complaints through the use of Application Replay diagnostics, and can be used on a live production application without interfering with its continued operation.

Enterprise cloud adoption has evolved to the point where hybrid public/private cloud designs and use of multiple providers is common. Who among us has mastered provisioning resources in different clouds; allocating the right resources to each application; assigning applications to the "best" cloud provider based on performance or reliability requirements.